1NC Round 6
Framework
A. Our interpretation is that the affirmative should have to instrumentally
defend the institutional implementation of a topical plan.
B. Violation – the aff doesn’t defend a plan.
C. Best for fairness.
1. Plan focus is the only predictable way of affirming the resolution.
Philosophical and theoretical concerns certainly play into the ways that policies
are made, but the resolution only calls for us to defend and/or question
political-institutional implementations of these kinds of concerns.
2. Plan focus is the only way to ensure a fair division of ground. The affirmative
has the advantage of trying to solve the most heinous problems of the status
quo—without plan focus, debates devolve into whether or not things like
racism, sexism, classism, or homophobia are good or bad. While problems are
often less contestable, solutions to these problems are—we can debate about
whether or not a particular proposal will fix or worsen these problems and
proffer our own solutions.
D. Best for education:
1. Political is value to life—it is how originally solipsistic lives become incarnate
and real to themselves.
Arendt 1958 [Hannah, The Human Condition, pp. 196-199]
The original, prephilosophic Greek remedy for this frailty had been the foundation of the polis. The
polis, as it grew out of and remained rooted in the Greek pre-polis experience and estimate of what
makes it worthwhile for men to live together (syzen), namely, the "sharing of words and deeds,"26 had a
twofold function. First, it was intended to enable men to do permanently, albeit under certain
restrictions, what otherwise had been possible only as an extraordinary and infrequent enterprise for
which they had to leave their households. The polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win "immortal
fame," that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word
who he was in his unique distinctness. One, if not the chief, reason for the incredible development of gift and genius in Athens,
as well as for the hardly less surprising swift decline of the city-state, was precisely that from beginning to end its foremost aim was to make the
extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life. The
second function of the polls, again closely connected with
the hazards of action as experienced before its coming into being, was to offer a remedy for the
futility of action and speech; for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not be forgotten, that
it actually would become "immortal," were not very good. Homer was not only a shining example of the poet's political
function, and therefore the "educator of all Hellas"; the very fact that so great an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten
without a poet to immortalize it several hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it
had nothing but poets to rely on for its permanence. We are not concerned here with the historical causes for the rise of the Greek city-state;
what the Greeks themselves thought of it and its ralson d'etre, they have made unmistakably clear. The
polis-—if we trust the famous
guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become
the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how
words of Pericles in the Funeral Oration—gives a
to turn words to praise them; without assistance from others, those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance
of their good and bad deeds, to inspire admiration in the present and in future ages.27 In other words, men's
life together in the
form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the
least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made "products," the deeds and stories which are their
outcome, would become imperishable. The organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the city
and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws—lest the succeeding generations change its identity beyond recognition is a kind of
organized remembrance. It assures the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that
comes from being seen, being heard, and, generally, appearing before an audience of fellow men, who outside the polis could attend only the
short duration of the performance and therefore needed Homer and "others of his craft" in order to be presented to those who were not there.
According to this self-interpretation, the political realm rises directly out of acting together, the
"sharing of words and deeds." Thus action not only has the most intimate relationship to the public
part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it. It is as though the wall
of the polis and the boundaries of the law were drawn around an already existing public space which,
however, without such stabilizing protection could not endure, could not survive the moment of
action and speech itself. Not historically, of course, but speaking metaphorically and theoretically, it is
as though the men who returned from the Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds
and sufferings, to prevent its perishing with their dispersal and return to their isolated homesteads. The
polis, properly speaking, is
not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting
and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no
matter where they happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword
of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants
which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the
widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where
men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly. This
space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like
the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the
modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world—do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live
in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically
speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of
others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being,"28 and whatever lacks this
appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without
reality.29
Cap K
Capitalism racializes subjects to divide social groups - a race and experience based
epistemology and theory of oppression breaks down the concept of class as an all
encompassing theory of exploitation that is the only way to enable the unification of
the proleteriat
Zavarzadeh 3 (Mas’ud, “The Pedagogy of Totality” p.11-13, in “JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and
Politics”, Volume 23.1, http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol23.1.html)
The pedagogy of appearance focuses on cultural representation and the role of representation in constructing the represented. By centering
teaching in the machinery of "representation,"it obliterates the objective. Reducing pedagogy to lessons in cultural semiotics, it makes "experience" of the pleasures of "depthless" surfaces the measure of reality and thus obscures the social relations of production that are the material
conditions of that experience. However, "This 'lived' experience is not a given, given by a pure 'reality,' but the spontaneous 'lived experience'
of ideology in its peculiar relationship to the real" (Althusser 223). The ideological value of the concept of "experience" in de-concep-ualizing
pedagogy will perhaps become more clear in examining the way bourgeois radical pedagogues, such as Giroux, deploy experience as an
instance of spontaneity to eviscerate class as an explanatory concept by which the social relations ofproperty are critiqued. In his Impure A ctsa book devoted to marginalizing explanatory concepts and popularizing "hybrids" and that, in effect, justifies political opportunism in pedagogy- Giroux
repeats the claims of such other cultural phenomenologists as Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, and Robin Kelley that
"class" is "lived through race" (28). Class, in other words, is an affect. He represents this affective view ofclass as
epistemological resistance against class which, he claims, is a universal category that takes the "difference" ofrace out of class. As I have already
epistemology is used in mainstream pedagogy as a cover for a reactionary class politics that does
several things, as Giroux demonstrates. First, it segregates the "black" proletariat from the "white" proletariat and
isolates both :from other "racial" prole- tariats. In doing so, Giroux's pedagogy carries out the political agenda
argued,
of capital - to pit one segment ofthe proletariat against the other and to tum the unity of the working
class into contesting (race) "differences." Second, it rewrites the system of wage labor itself into a hybrid.
Giroux's experience-ism obscures the systematicity of wage labor and argues that there is no capitalism
operating with a single logic of exploitation. Instead, there are many, aleatory, ad hoc, local arrangements
between employees and employers depending on the color of the worker not the laws ofmotion ofcapital. Third,
it converts capitalism from an economic system based on the"exploitation" of humans by
humans(wagelabor)- through the ownership ofthe means ofproduction-into an institution of cultural "oppression" based
on "power." Fourth, since class is lived through race, it is not an objective fact (the relation of the worker to
ownership ofthe means ofproduction) but a subjective experience. The experience of ("living") class through race, like all
experiences, is contingent, aleatory, and indeterminate. Class (lived through the experi- ence of race) is thus reconstituted as
contingent - an accident not a necessity of wage labor. Fifth, since capitalism is not a system but a series
of ad hoc arrangements of exchange with various workers of diverse colors, it does not produce an
objective binary class system but only cultural differences. One cannot, therefore, obtain objective
knowledge of capitalism . There are, in short, no laws ofmotion ofcapital; there are only "experiences" ofwork influenced by one's
color. Consequently, to say-as I have said-that capitalism is a regime ofexploitation is simply a totalitarian closure. We cannot know what
capitalism is because, according to Giroux's logic, it is fraught with differences (ofrace) not the singularity of"surplus labor." In Giroux's
pedagogy, there is no capital- ism ("totality"), only cultural effects of capitals without capitalism ("differences"). Giroux represents his gutting of
class as a radical and groundbreaking notion that will lead to liberation ofthe oppressed. However, he never completes the
logic of his
argument because in the end it will de-ground his position and turn it into epistemological nonsense and
political pantomime. Ifclass is a universal category that obliterates the difference of race, there is (on the basis of such a claim) no
reason not to say that race is also a universal category because it obliterates the difference of sexuality (and other differences), which is, by the
same logic, itself a universal category since it obliterates the difference of age (and other differences), which is itselfa universal category
because it obliterates the difference of (dis)ability (and other differences), which is itselfa univer- sal category because it obliterates the
difference of class (and other differences). In short, the
social, in Giroux's pedagogy is a circle of oppressions, none of
whose components can explain any structural relations; each simply absorbs the other ("class is actually
lived through race," paraphrasing Giroux) and
thus points back to itself as a local knowledge ofthe affective,
difference, and contingency. Class explains race; it does not absorb it as an experience (see Butler, "Merely"), nor does i t reduce it
to the contingencies o f ethnicities (Hall, "New") or urban performativities (Kelley, Yo '). To put it differently, since in this pluralism of
oppressions each element cancels out the explanatory capacity of all others, the existing social
relations are reaffirmed in a pragmatic balancing of differences. Nothing changes, everything is
resignified. The classroom of experience reduces all concepts (which it marks as "grand narratives") to affects ("little stories") and, instead
of explaining the social in order to change it, only "interprets" it as a profusion of differences. Teaching becomes an affirmation of the singularas-is; its lessons "save the honor of the name" (see Lyotard, Postmodern 82). Giroux's program is a mimesis ofthe logic of the ruling ideology: as
in all pedagogies of affect, it redescribes the relation of the subject of knowledge with the world but leaves the world itselfintact byreifying the
signs of"difference" (see Rorty, Contingency 53, 73). The subject, as I will discuss later in my analysis ofCary Nelson's radical pedagogy, feels
differently about itself in a world that remains what it was. Giroux is putting forth a class-cleansing pedagogy: he erases class from teaching in
the name ofepistemology ("totalization"). But as I have already argued, epistemology
is not an issue for Giroux; it is an alibi for
hollowing out from class its economic explanatory power. Epistemology in bourgeois pedagogy is class politics
represented as "theory"-whose aim is to tum class into a cultural aleatory experience. In Giroux's phenomenological experientialism, lived
experience is an excuse for advancing the cause of capital in a populist logic (respect for the ineluctable
"experience" of the student) so that the student, the future worker, is trained as one who understands the world
only through the sense-able - his own "unique" experience as black, white, or brown; man or woman; gay or
straight - but never as a proletariat: a person who, regardless of race, sexuality, gender, age, or (dis)ability has to sell his or her labor
power to capital in order to obtain subsistence wages in exchange. Experience, in Giroux's pedagogy, becomes a self-protecting
"inside" that resists world-historical knowledge as an intrusion from "outside"; it thus valorizes ignorance as a
mark of the authenticity and sovereignty ofthe subject-as independence and free choice.
The affirmative sustains capitalism by denying the fluid nature of borders in claiming
they can be separated from capitalism—only orthodox Marxism can solve the harms
of the aff by recognizing structural inequality as the source of division
DeFazio, professor @ the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, 02
[Kimberly, May/June, Red Critique, “Whither Borders?”,
http://www.redcritique.org/MayJune02/whitherborders.htm]
Until recently the leaders of big business couldn't boast enough about the new "borderless"
economy—a post-national world of global prosperity in which capital, labor, goods and services circulate
freely—and its limitless opportunities for travel, commerce, and communication. So borderless was this new world, these
triumphalist narratives suggested, that like all identities the border between rich and poor worldwide
was being blurred in a continuum of boundless consumption. As corporate consultant Kenichi Ohmae has argued, "as
the 21st century approaches and as what I call the four 'I's'—industry, investment, individuals, and information—flow relatively unimpeded
across national borders, the building-block concepts appropriate to a 19th-century, closed-country model of the world no longer hold" (The End
of the Nation State vii). Borderlessness
had become a code for the new global freedom. Yet with the
emergence of the so-called war on terror, the borders have "returned" to the borderless economy, and "freedom" is
being redefined. It appears that the Bush Administration is concerned with nothing other than securing US borders, tightening controls and
channeling billions of dollars of public funds to new and already existing national security, police and intelligence departments. The borders, it
seems, had become too "permeable". Suddenly
we are told that the US borders are dangerously insecure, and
the preservation of American freedom now lies in the suspension of virtually all democratic rights ,
including far-reaching new surveillance technologies to police all borders of the US, as a means of distinguishing "safe" immigrants from
"dangerous" ones, "us" from "them", the "civilized" from the "barbarians". Immigrants are under attack not only in the US, but throughout
Europe (or "Fortress Europe", as it has become known), where a number of far-right politicians have come to prominence on anti-immigrant
policies, pulling with them to the right "new social democrats" such as Tony Blair. And in one of the most violent manifestations of bordering,
Israel has begun constructing a physical barrier further imprisoning Palestinians behind a 12 mile long security fence, separating "peace-loving"
Israelis from, as Israeli government official Effi Eitam put it recently, Palestinian "animals". The
borderlessness of the new
economy now appears as what it always was: a deadly farce, with freedom another name for the free
market. For, it is not only the recent corporate scandals that have exposed the great economic crisis now shaking the foundations of society
worldwide, but the actual decline of the living and working conditions of the vast majority of the world's
people, more and more of whom are forced to live under increasingly desperate situations of poverty, hunger,
illness, illiteracy and rampant destruction caused by imperialist wars—while a tiny global ruling elite
accumulates ever more wealth and control over world resources. The borderless world, in short, was never
without borders. It was always founded on the border of exploitation; that is, the relation between the
propertyless and the property owners. Those who have only their labor to sell because they do not
own the means of production on one side, and on the other those who own the means of production
and therefore compel all who do not to work for them, in exchange for wages which represent only a fraction of the value actually produced.
The "return" of the border since September 11 represents the exacerbation of the antagonism
between labor and capital: an antagonism which exceeds all national borders. This relation between
workers and owners is the fundamental "border" hidden beneath the euphoric rhetoric of
borderlessness—a rhetoric that has found expression in the last decade not only in the managerial
philosophy of corporate gurus and the third-way policies of US and European state officials, but in the high-theory idiom
of postmodern "hybridity" and the more popular discourse of the Internet.
Chicana/o studies embraces postmodernity’s emphasis on ambivalence and
partiality—this mystifies social relations and makes a critique of capitalism impossible
Gonzalez 4 [Marcial, “Historical Materialism and Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” Science & Society 68.2]
In arguing that Chicana/o studies has been influenced by post- modernist theory, I am not declaring that all Chicana/o critics are
postmodernists. Nor am I alleging that Chicana/o criticism has cate- gorically rejected all approaches to the study of literature that are not
postmodernist. Rather, I make two claims. First,
the interpre- tive methods employed in Chicana/o studies have
been substantially informed by postmodernist theory. Second, despite its status as a form of social
critique, postmodernist theory mystifies social relations and, consequently, limits rather than
enhances the possibility for critical class consciousness. Presumably, few cultural critics would disagree with my first
claim. José Saldívar, for example, encourages readers to consider "the effects of shifting critical
paradigms in American Studies away from linear narratives of immigration, assimilation, and
nationhood. Is it possible," he asks, "to imagine new cultural affilia- tions and negotiations in American studies more dialogically, in terms
of multifaceted migrations across borders?" (J. Saldívar, 1997, 1). Similarly, as Renato Rosaldo explains, "a sea change in
cultural stud- ies has eroded once-dominant conceptions of truth and objectivity. The truth of
objectivism - absolute, universal, and timeless - has lost its monopoly status. It now competes, on
more nearly equal terms, with the truths . . . embedded in local contexts, shaped by local in- terests
and colored by local perceptions" (Rosaldo, 1989, 21). Addi- tionally, Rafael Pérez-Torres more pointedly
exclaims, "postmodern- ism marks the end of teleological thinking in the secular sphere. The ideas of
Project and Progress give way to positions of locality and negotiation, issues we have seen inform the
discussion of contempo- rary Chicano politics" (Pérez-Torres, 1995, 14). These comments substantiate my first assertion that
a methodological change has taken place in Chicana/o cultural studies in the direction of the postmodern. Disagreement, however, will likely
surface in response to my second claim - that postmodernism mystifies rather than cri- tiques social relations. In anticipation of this
disagreement, the rest of this essay is divided into three parts. In the first part, after briefly discussing the emergence of postmodernism as a
cultural condition, I review two relevant works on the relation between postmodernism and Chicana/o literature: Rosaura Sanchez's essay,
"Postmodernism and Chicano Literature," and Ellen McCracken's provocative study, New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern
Ethnicity. In
the sec- ond part of the essay, I analyze the limitations of two postmodernist- inspired
concepts - cultural schizophrenia and heterotopia - that have been employed by critics to explain
ideological ambivalence in Chicana/o literature. Throughout this essay, I endeavor to put into practice
a historical materialist criticism for the study of Chicana/o literature. In the final section, I outline
some key aspects of this criti- cal approach. For the sake of clarity, it is important to distinguish postmodern- ism as a cultural
condition from postmodernist theory. Far from being a mere illusion, postmodernism marks the emergence of an actual
condition, characterized by extreme social fragmentation and differ- entiation, skepticism toward
universal systems, a preference for local- ized politics as opposed to mass movements, and the
depthlessness of aesthetic production. This condition, according to David Harvey, began to emerge
around 1970 with the development of advanced manufacturing and marketing technologies, resulting
in a more "flex- ible" system for managing financial services, markets and labor. These changes in turn
produced new cultural values, beliefs and practices, consistent with the overall anarchy and
irrationality of this new chaotic form of capitalist control. Harvey's analysis of postmodernity of- fers a way to
understand its emergence from within a traditional base- superstructure model, where ideas, values, and ideologies can be traced back to
social class contradictions within the mode of production. It must be pointed out, of course, that the shift to a "flexible" social mode has not
affected all sectors of the working class equally. In Dancing With the Devil, José Limon explains that "industrialization and urbanization came to
Texas" (Limón, 102) in the period that Harvey characterizes as the zenith of Fordism, specifically the post- World War II period. Yet, "Texas and
its Mexican population experi- enced an 'uneven development,' a less than ideal version of the Fordist contract" {ibid.). In other words, Mexican
immigrants in south Texas and other locations along the border working in agriculture and the service industries have never benefited from a
"truce" between capi- tal and labor, nor from the kinds of concessions that may have been granted to workers in other industries. One might
even consider the conditions for many immigrants and other unskilled minimum-wage (or lower) workers as pre-Fordist, and in some cases
perhaps even pre- modern. For example, in a cultural anthropological study of Latino undocumented immigrants who enter the United States
to work, Leo Chavez explains that many undocumented immigrants are drawn to northern San Diego County by the demand for labor in the
strawberry, tomato and avocado fields, as well as in large nurseries and flower farms. Scattered throughout this area, workers live in temporary
camps near the fields that they tend. . . . Workers set up makeshift sleeping shelters of plastic, cardboard, tar paper, discarded wood, and
anything else that is at hand. These encampments can be found on hillsides covered by dense brush, and in canyons with pleasant-sounding
names. . . . Even though they are just moments away from middle and upper- middle class neighborhoods and communities, they stand in stark
contrast to the growing affluence of north San Diego County. These camps resemble the living conditions I have seen in Third World countries.
(Chavez, 1992, 63.) Of course, not all Latino workers live under such dire circumstances, but the
effects of the super-exploitation
of Latino immigrants (espe- cially along the border) have left their mark on literary representa- tions
of Chicana/ o social experiences historically. These experiences have been represented in part as
ideological ambivalence - as the characterization of human subjects that vacillate between different
languages, cultures, countries and classes, caught up in a state of perpetual betweenness, articulated
through such concepts as "borderlands thinking." Postmodernist theory misinterprets literary ambivalence as a subversive force in itself, rather than analyzing this ambivalence as the product of
capitalist exploitation.
The logic of capitalism results in extinction through the creation of ecological
catastrophe and violent imperialist wars that will turn nuclear
Foster 5 [John Bellamy, Monthly Review, September, Vol. 57, Issue 4, “Naked Imperialism”,
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm]
From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that
would be taken by U.S. imperialism following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt.
Capitalism by its very logic is a globally expansive system. The contradiction between its
transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it remains rooted in particular
nation states is insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to
overcome this contradiction are just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In present world
circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly of the means of destruction, the
temptation for that state to attempt to seize full-spectrum dominance and to transform itself into
the de facto global state governing the world economy is irresistible. As the noted Marxian philosopher István
Mészáros observed in Socialism or Barbarism? (2001)—written, significantly, before George W. Bush became president: “[W]hat
is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting
at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its
totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower, with all means—even the most
extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military ones—at its disposal.” The unprecedented
dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is
heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of nuclear
war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administration’s refusal
to sign the C omprehensive T est B an T reaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the
Kyoto Protocol
as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May–June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: “The
United States has never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain
prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear
enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so.” The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the willingness to
use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees
fit—setting the whole world on edge. The
nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to
global warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the world’s total) has become the greatest
obstacle to addressing global warming and the world’s growing environmental problems—raising
the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if present trends continue. The United States is
seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the planet during a time of widening global crisis:
economic stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the global poor,
weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening ecological decline.
The result is a heightening of international instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the
world, such as the European Community and China,that could eventually challenge U.S. power, regionally and
even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again,
symbolized by Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip
on the Middle East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi
resistance, generating conditions of imperial overstretch. With the United States brandishing its
nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control of such weapons,
nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be
expected soon to enter the “nuclear club.” Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third
world is now a well-recognized reality, generating rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York,
London, and elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and
uneven development of the global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary
domination , foreshadow what is potentially the most dangerous period in the history of
imperialism. The course on which U.S and world capitalism is now headed points to global
barbarism—or worse. Yet it is important to remember that nothing in the development of human
history is inevitable. There still remains an alternative path—the global struggle for a humane,
egalitarian, democratic, and sustainable society. The classic name for such a society is “socialism.”
Such a renewed struggle for a world of substantive human equality must begin by addressing the
system’s weakest link and at the same time the world’s most pressing needs—by organizing a
global resistance movement against the new naked imperialism.
Class divisions are the root of all other oppressions
Kovel 2 (Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, awarded Fellowship at the John
Guggenheim Foundation, Joel, The Enemy of Nature, pages 123-124)
If, however, we ask the question of efficacy, that is, which split sets the others into motion, then priority would have to be given to class, for the
plain reason that class
relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the
state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both logically
and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of 'classism' to go along with 'sexism' and
'racism,' and `species-ism'). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially man-made category, without root in even a
mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctions – although we can
imagine a world without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable –
indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species' time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over
gender. Historically, the difference arises because 'class'
signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state
apparatus whose conquests and regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will
be no true resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the
activities of a class-defending state.'° Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its
state, demands the super-exploitation of woman's labour. Class society continually generates gender,
racial, ethnic oppressions and the like, which take on a life of their own, as well as profoundly affecting the concrete relations of
class itself. It follows that class politics must be fought out in terms of all the active forms of social splitting. It is the management of these
divisions that keeps state society functional. Thus though each
person in a class society is reduced from what s/he can
become, the varied reductions can be combined into the great stratified regimes of history — this one becoming a fierce warrior, that one a
routine-loving clerk, another a submissive seamstress, and so on, until we reach today's personifications of capital and captains of industry. Yet
no matter how functional a class society, the profundity of its ecological violence ensures a basic
antagonism which drives history onward. History is the history of class society — because no matter how
modified, so powerful a schism is bound to work itself through to the surface, provoke resistance (`class struggle'), and lead to the succession of
powers. The relation of class can be mystified without end — only consider the extent to which religion exists for just this purpose, or watch a
show glorifying the police on television — yet so long as we have any respect for human nature, we must recognize that so fundamental an
antagonism as would steal the vital force of one person for the enrichment of another cannot be conjured away.
Vote negative to adopt the historical material criticism of the 1NC - historical analysis
of the material conditions of capital is the only way to break free from is
contradictions and social inequalities it causes
Tumino 1 (Steven, teaches at the City University of New York, Spring, What is Orthodox Marxism and
Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before)
Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated understanding of social practices and, based
on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now,
only
Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality
and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I
mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself
contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria)
existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I
regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism
within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on
freedom from necessity. I will argue that to
know contemporary society—and to be able to act on such
knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes the existing social totality. I will argue that the
dominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but inequality of
economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic
inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These
are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of
capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain
social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my
main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender,
race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They
accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been
the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the
way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics
(Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its
cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism,
feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such
an understanding of social inequality is based on the fundamental
understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is
produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape the
historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and
its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be
founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the
technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social
theory.
Historical materialist understanding of the way that consciousness is shaped by social
reality is key to negate the ideology of ambivalence and contradiction embraced by
postmodernism. This is a prerequisite to transforming capitalist social relations and
solving the aff because the reality of class conflict is the methodological dynamo of
our times.
Gonzalez 2004 [Marcial, “Historical Materialism and Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” Science & Society
68.2]
I shall draw this essay to a close by proposing a historical materialist criticism for the study of Chicana/o literature. But to attempt
comprehensive description of historical materialism in these short pages would be futile. I shall therefore briefly discuss six issues re- lated to
First , historical
materialism attempts to understand the dialecti- cal relation between the particularities of existence
and the larger social frameworks that give them meaning. R. Saldivar, for example, puts this
dialectical procedure in motion when he reads Chicana/o narratives not as the transparent replication
of events, but as texts that imagine the "ways in which historical men and women live out their lives
as class subjects," a project that involves "attaining a true knowledge of society as a whole" (R. Saldivar, 1990, 6). Dialectical
criticism enables a comprehension of "society as a whole" through the "abstraction from specific real
conditions, followed by systematic analysis, and then by successive reapproximations to the real, all made necessary because
everyday experience catches only the delusive ap- pearance of things" (89). Second , as a dialectical
system historical materialism comes into conflict with postmodernist theory. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner
point out, postmodernism not only promotes a skeptical view of his- tory and subjectivity, it
"aggressively rejects dialectics" (Best and Kellner, 1991, 222) . They offer a lucid analysis of the tension between dialectics and
postmodernism, arguing that dialectics "attempts to describe how concrete particulars are constituted by
more general and abstract social forces, undertaking an analysis of particulars to illuminate these
broader social forces [but] postmodern theory re- jects dialectics in principle . . . and thus is unable to
conceptualize the dialectic of totalization and fragmentation" (223). Deleuze aptly encapsulates the postmodernist
historical materialism that will serve as a starting point for better understanding the method I am proposing.
attitude toward dialectics when he declares: "What I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic" (Deleuze, 1977,
112).
Without an understanding of the relation between universal processes and their local manifes-
tations, postmodernism ends up producing a fetish of social fragmen- tation by privileging concepts
such as "schizophrenia" to describe the ideal postmodern (non)-subject. Third , historical materialism
affords avenues for understanding the complex categories of identity based on race, ethnicity,
sexuality and gender, not as autonomous formations but as interconnected processes within the
larger dynamics of social relations. This is what Stuart Hall has in mind when he characterizes the
category of race as "the modality in which class is lived" (Hall, 1996, 55). Hall theo- rizes the thorny relation between
these categories, recognizing the particularity and relative autonomy of race without jettisoning the causal character of class relations. From a
similar perspective, Teresa Ebert argues "for a revolutionary understanding and engagement with historical materialism for feminism in
postmodernity," and she does so "at a time when feminism, for the most part, has lost the revo- lutionary knowledges of historical materialism
so necessary to under- stand the exploitative relations of labor and production and to trans- form them" (Ebert, 1996, xi). In adopting a
theoretical model and argumentative approach similar to Ebert's, I
would characterize my own method as an
engagement with historical materialism for U. S. ethnic literary studies generally, and for Chicana/o
literary studies in particular, and I propose this method at a time when literary and cultural studies in
race and ethnicity "for the most part, [have] lost the revolutionary knowledges of historical
materialism," succumbing instead to the epistemological and political limitations of method- ologies
emerging from what Best and Kellner call "the postmodern turn." Fourth , the categories and concepts of
historical materialism are not pre-established truths set in stone. To argue that dialectical criti- cism
represents an absolute truth would amount to a contradiction in terms since such an argument would
tend to reify the methodologi- cal approach. In a much cited passage, Georg Lukács argues, "orthodox Marxism . . . does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It
is not the 'belief ' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred' book. ... It refers exclusively to
method" (Lukács, 1971, 1). Similarly, Peter Knapp and Alan Spector explain, "dialectics is a way of looking
at reality, not as a complex of ready-made 'things' but as a set of processes. The dialectical approach
examines the ways that everything changes. A dialectical approach asks . . . How do [these changes] connect to the rest of the
world? This concern with change and interrelation implies that dialectical analyses are usually historical" (Knapp and Spector, 1991, 264). Additionally, Alfred Sohn-Rethel argues that historical materialism should not be considered a "world view" or an empirical science about how the
world operates; nor should it be assumed that historical ma- terialism possesses a predetermined set of laws requiring only that an astute
Fifth , the goal of Marxism is
not to correct faulty ideas but to negate them - to critique them, to transform them qualitatively. As
Ebert argues, for instance, "ludic" postmodernism must be "critiqued" not simply because its theories about
society and culture are faulty (even if they are in fact faulty), but because they function as ideol- ogy that
correlates to real social contradictions. For a theory to be faulty implies that it can be corrected. The
Marxist critique of post- modernism does not serve as an analytical corrective, but as an en- gagement
that leads to a démystification of real contradictions. In a similar vein, Sohn-Rethel explains that the
superiority of historical materialism over other methods of interpretation does not rest in the claim
that it is capable of arriving at better or more correct analyses. The difference between Marxism and
other methods cannot be mea- sured on a quantitative scale, where the various methods measure up
as more or less correct. Finally (in an effort to synthesize the five points just outlined) , historical materialism should
be considered a "methodological pos- tulate" (Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 189-204) that makes truth-claims about
social existence, but only after a thorough critique of the concepts and ideas associated with that
existence. As a "methodological pos- tulate," historical materialism stands opposed to unmediated
reflec- tion theory, which can be considered a pseudo-materialist approach based on the premise
that, because social existence determines con- sciousness, consciousness logically must reflect social
existence. His- torical materialism agrees that social existence determines conscious- ness, but it holds
that consciousness does not "reflect" social existence transparently. On the contrary, consciousness
necessarily mystifies the social world because it functions not independently from social real- ity, as in
unmediated reflection theory, but as an integral part of re- ality. In the same way that Marx showed
how "capital is not a thing, but a social relation established by the instrumentality of things" (Marx, 1974,
766), Sohn-Rethel argues that the intellect is not "pure thought," but rather an abstraction of universal
social relations, es- tablished concretely by the instrumentality of cognition. Further, the abstractions
that take place in both commodity exchange and cogni- tion operate, at one level, to conceal social
relations and, on another, as a "social synthesis" to maintain cohesion and stability within the mode
of production out of which they emerge. Thus, for Sohn-Rethel, although existence produces
"necessarily false consciousness," it is only through a critical study of this con- sciousness that the
historical materialist arrives at a greater knowl- edge of social existence, as if attempting to solve a
mystery entirely with clues that are intentionally designed to lead the investigator down a false trail.
practitioner impose those laws from the outside on the object of study (Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 189-204).
But even if the clues are false, the truth may be approxi- mated from the formal logic and content of the distortions them- selves. "Roughly,"
Sohn-Rethel argues, "the Marxist approach to his- torical reality can be understood as answering the question: what must the existential reality
of society be like to necessitate such and such a form of consciousness?" (197). He adds: Thus,
methodologically the subjectmatter of Marx's critique is not the his- torical reality of this or that form of social existence but, in the
first instance, a particular mode of consciousness - namely, that of political economy; it is thoughts,
not things. It is the concepts of "value," "capital," "profit," "rent," etc., as he found them defined and
discussed in the writings of economists. He does not deal directly with realities, does not elaborate
concepts of his own which, as "correct" ones, he would oppose to the "false" ones of the economists.
His approach is characteristically different. It is an approach to reality, but by way of the "critique" of the historically given
consciousness. (Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 195.) Following Sohn-Rethel's argument, a historical materialist critique of postmodernism and its
influences on Chicana/o cultural studies should not be understood as a critique of social existence as such - even if the goal is to arrive at a
better understanding of social exis- tence in order to develop more effective strategies for changing so- ciety. A Marxist critique of
postmodernism should be viewed rather as a critique of ideas and theories that emerge from a particular his- torical reality, which we can now
hypothesize as a politically unstable, economically chaotic, contradiction-ridden capitalist mode of pro- duction that must increasingly give the
appearance of being stable in order to maintain cohesion - or, when the deception of instabil- ity no longer remains feasible, must make the
instability and chaos appear natural and perhaps even progressive, as in the case of post- modernist thought. Historical
materialism,
then, does not begin with the premise that it possesses a more truthful account of social reality than
does postmodernism; it claims only that the critique of the lat- ter by the former initiates a dialectical
process through which social contradictions and other previously concealed truths about social
existence become evident. In this essay I have argued that Chicana/o writers and critics hold much
interest in explaining ideological ambivalence in both creative and critical works. Postmodernism,
however, hinders rather than helps in these efforts because it celebrates the appearances and effects of fragmentation, rather than engaging in a critique of its causes - or rather than theorizing a
viable response to alienation. From a Marxist perspective, ideological ambivalence reflects the
symptoms of reification resulting from the individualizing and divisive needs of a capitalist mode of
production. Thus, the ambivalence of Chicana/o literature represents real social contradictions,
mediated in the com- plex nexus of author, reader, text and history. From this perspective,
postmodernism's celebration of fragmentation coupled with its vicious attacks against the concept of
totality reproduces its own reified con- dition. Despite this apparent paradox, Chicana/o cultural
criticism nonetheless has turned in the direction of the postmodern. Post- modernist theory might be
considered one of the most popular forms of "ideology critique" on the cultural studies market today,
but to my mind postmodernism has become the ideology, not the critique.
Historical materialism must come first - it predetermines consciousness and the very
possibilities of reflective thinking
Marx 1859 (Karl, a pretty important dude. “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
Preface” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm) JM
>edited for gendered language<
In the social production of their existence, [people] inevitably enter into definite relations, which are
independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of
their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society,
the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The
mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual
life. It is not the consciousness of [people] that determines their existence, but their social existence
that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of
society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal
terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive
forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then
begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation
lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is
always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in
short, ideological forms in which [people] become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does
not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its
consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of
material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is
ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and
new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their
existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Case
Opening the border for inclusion only masks other forms of exclusion- making
immigrants even more hesitant to cross the border
Motomura 07
(Hiroshi, Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, 2007, “Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of
Immigration and Citizenship in the United States”, pg 13)
This entire inquiry reflects my hope that national citizenship in
the United States can be a viable context for a sense
of belonging and for participation in civic, political, social, and economic life that is inclusive and
respectful of all individuals. There are certainly other models of belonging, including transnational
models that reflect a sense of belonging to more than one nation, and postnational models that think
beyond national citizenship entirely. But the apparent inclusiveness of these other approaches to
belonging can mask other modes of exclusion. If national citizenship matters less, ties of religion, race, class, and other
groupings that are less cosmopolitan or democratic than national citizenship will matter even more than they do already. The result may be a
world without national walls but also a world of a “thousand petty fortresses,” as political philosopher Michael Walzer once put it.10 Making
national citizenship into an inclusive vehicle is not easy. It requires a welcome of immigrants—
crystallized in the idea of Americans in waiting—that has faded from law and policy in the United
States. Although this idea has weakened and is in danger of weakening further, it should be restored to prominent influence because it
captures this basic truth: a sensible we/they line must reflect the understanding that many of them will
become part of us. This understanding was the conceptual engine for integrating generations of
immigrants—mostly those from Europe. With much of this understanding gone, we should not be
surprised if more recent waves of immigrants, especially immigrants of color, seem more reluctant to
cross the we/they line into American society. Recovering the lost story of immigrants as Americans in waiting is thus crucial
not only to giving immigrants their due, but also to recovering the vision of our national future that is reflected in the phrase “a nation of
immigrants”— that America is made up of immigrants, but still one nation.
The state of international relations is a consequence of politics – the move to place
ethics above politics hides the political constitution of the world, making effective
changes of it impossible
Mark F.N. Franke, University of Northern British Columbia, 2000, European Journal of International
Relations, Vol. 6, No. 3, p. 321-322
If critical inquiries into international politics offer any positive position, it is that ‘the
world’ or ‘the international’ and any
representations of these things are first and foremost the consequences of politics. Thus, while one ought to accept the
fact that any approach to International Relations is already ethically situated, one need not accept ethics or the ethical as the
conditions from which politics in the world ought to be understood or through which they arise. For
example, Hugh C. Dyer is quite right to claim that ‘whatever facts are apprehended [in terms of International Relations] are apprehended as a
consequence of normative influences’ (1997: 201). But it does not then follow that ‘political substance resides in values’ (Dyer, 1997: 202).
Neither International Relations nor the world are themselves the grounds of politics. Rather, they are
ways of framing politics of human life in terms of ethics, in terms that may allegedly make sense for humans so
understood. My contention is that it is the conflict of ideas and actions in inter-human encounters that produces
the possibility of world politics. Experiencing the way in which one’s views and actions are inhibited or even negated through
contact and engagement with others produces the grounds under which a competition of views may seem necessary. And the most successful
medium through which one’s own views may survive is one that can claim global validity. Even where persons may decide that competition is
undesirable, it is only through a general subscription to some sort of universal concept that the experience of conflict may be avoided. In this
case, all, willingly or through coercion, may agree to a fundamental sense of how things are in order to enjoy respective differences, as in the
social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hence, all
politics may be viewed as essentially a world
politics, as politics involves constant efforts to world in one sense or another. But, paradoxically, critical
inquiry must also take the position that there is no world in world politics, understood in whatever
manner.
Ethical obligations are tautological—the only coherent rubric is to maximize number
of lives saved
Greene 2010 – Associate Professor of the Social Sciences Department of Psychology Harvard
University (Joshua, Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s
Soul”, www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Developmental/Greene-KantSoul.pdf)
¶ What turn-of-the-millennium science is telling us is that human moral judgment is not a pristine
rational enterprise, that our moral judgments are driven by a hodgepodge of emotional dispositions,
which themselves were shaped by a hodgepodge of evolutionary forces, both biological and cultural.
Because of this, it is exceedingly unlikely that there is any rationally coherent normative moral
theory that can accommodate our moral intuitions . Moreover, anyone who claims to have such a
theory, or even part of one, almost certainly doesn't . Instead, what that person probably has is a moral rationalization.¶ It seems then, that we
have somehow crossed the infamous "is"-"ought" divide. How did this happen? Didn't Hume (Hume, 1978) and Moore (Moore, 1966) warn us against trying to
derive an "ought" from and "is?" How did we go from descriptive scientific theories concerning moral psychology to skepticism about a whole class of normative
moral theories? The answer is that we did not, as Hume and Moore anticipated, attempt to derive an "ought" from and "is." That is, our method has been inductive
rather than deductive. We have inferred on the basis of the available evidence that the phenomenon of rationalist deontological philosophy is best explained as a
rationalization of evolved emotional intuition (Harman, 1977). ¶ Missing
the Deontological Point I suspect that rationalist
deontologists will remain unmoved by the arguments presented here. Instead, I suspect, they will insist that I
have simply misunderstood what Kant and like-minded deontologists are all about . Deontology, they will
say, isn't about this intuition or that intuition. It's not defined by its normative differences with consequentialism. Rather,
deontology is about taking humanity seriously. Above all else, it's about respect for persons. It's about treating others as fellow rational
creatures rather than as mere objects, about acting for reasons rational beings can share. And so on (Korsgaard, 1996a; Korsgaard, 1996b).This is, no
doubt, how many deontologists see deontology. But this insider's view, as I've suggested, may be
misleading . The problem, more specifically, is that it defines deontology in terms of values that are not
distinctively deontological ,
though they may appear to be from the inside. Consider the following analogy with religion. When one asks a religious
person to explain the essence of his religion, one often gets an answer like this: "It's about love, really. It's
about looking out for other people, looking beyond oneself. It's about community, being part of something larger than oneself." This sort of answer
accurately captures the phenomenology of many people's religion, but it's nevertheless inadequate
for distinguishing religion from other things. This is because many, if not most, non-religious people aspire to love deeply, look out for
other people, avoid self-absorption, have a sense of a community, and be connected to things larger than themselves. In other words, secular humanists and
atheists can assent to most of what many religious people think religion is all about. From a secular humanist's point of view, in contrast, what's distinctive about
religion is its commitment to the existence of supernatural entities as well as formal religious institutions and doctrines. And they're right. These things really do
distinguish religious from non-religious practices, though they may appear to be secondary to many people operating from within a religious point of view. In the
same way, I believe that most of the
standard deontological/Kantian self-characterizatons fail to distinguish
deontology from other approaches to ethics . (See also Kagan (Kagan, 1997, pp. 70-78.) on the difficulty of defining deontology.) It
seems to me that consequentialists, as much as anyone else,
have respect for persons , are against treating people as
mere objects, wish to act for reasons that rational creatures can share , etc. A consequentialist
respects other persons, and refrains from treating them as mere objects, by counting every person's
well-being in the decision-making process . Likewise, a consequentialist attempts to act according to
reasons that rational creatures can share by acting according to principles that give equal weight to
everyone's interests , i.e. that are impartial. This is not to say that consequentialists and deontologists don't differ. They do. It's just that
the real differences may not be what deontologists often take them to be. What, then, distinguishes deontology from other kinds of moral thought? A good strategy
for answering this question is to start with concrete disagreements between deontologists and others (such as consequentialists) and then work backward in search
of deeper principles. This is what I've attempted to do with the trolley and footbridge cases, and other instances in which deontologists and consequentialists
disagree. If
you ask a deontologically-minded person why it's wrong to push someone in front of speeding
trolley in order to save five others, you will getcharacteristically deontological answers. Some will be tautological:
"Because it's murder!" Others will be more sophisticated: "The ends don't justify the means." "You have to
respect people's rights."
But , as we know, these answers don't really explain anything, because if you give the same
people (on different occasions) the trolley case or the loop case (See above), they'll make the opposite judgment , even though
their initial explanation concerning the footbridge case applies equally well to one or both of these cases. Talk about rights, respect for
persons, and reasons we can share are natural attempts to explain, in "cognitive" terms, what we feel
when we find ourselves having emotionally driven intuitions that are odds with the cold calculus of
consequentialism. Although these explanations are inevitably incomplete, there seems to be "something deeply right"
about them because they give voice to powerful moral emotions . But, as with many religious
people's accounts of what's essential to religion, they don't really explain what's distinctive about the
philosophy in question.
Only pragmatic philosophy can evade the logical harms of the K and still take action
against great atrocities – We’re not committed to their slippery slope link args
Rorty 2 (Richard, U Minn,
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm)JFS
The most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places,
constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we
have
not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police
come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form “There is
something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will
endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you.” This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre’s remark:
Tomorrow, after my death, certain people
may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or
miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the
worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are. This hard saying brings out what ties
Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together- the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we
have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality
that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions. A postphilosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite,
with no links to something Beyond. On the pragmatist’s account, position was only a halfway stage in the
development of such a culture-the progress toward, as Sartre puts it, doing without God. For positivism preserved a god in
its notion of Science (and in its notion of “scientific philosophy”), the notion of a portion of culture where we touched something not
ourselves, where we found Truth naked, relative to no description. The
culture of positivism thus produced endless swings
are merely ‘relative’ (or ‘emotive,’ or ‘subjective’)” and the view that
bringing the “scientific method” to bear on questions of political and moral choice was the solution to all our
problems. Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views
science as one genre of literature-or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as
scientific inquiries. Thus it sees ethics as neither more “relative” or “subjective” than scientific theory, nor as needing
to be made “scientific.” Physics is a way of trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope
of the pendulum between the view that “values
with other bits. Mathematics helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its. Some of these inquiries come up with
propositions, some with narratives, some with paintings. The question of what propositions to assert, which pictures to look at, what
narratives to listen to and comment on and retell, are all questions about what will help us get what we want (or about what we should
want). No. The question of whether the
pragmatist view of truth-that it is t a profitable topic-is itself true is thus a
question about whether a post-Philosophical culture is a good thing to try for. It is not a question
about what the word “true” means, nor about the requirements of an adequate philosophy of language, nor about
whether the world “exists independently of our minds,” nor about whether the intuitions of our culture are captured in the
pragmatists’ slogans. There is no way in which the issue between the pragmatist and his opponent can be
tightened up and resolved according to criteria agreed to by both sides. This is one of those issues which puts
everything up for grabs at once -where there is no point in trying to find agreement about “the data” or about what would
count as deciding the question. But the messiness of the issue is not a reason for setting it aside. The issue
between religion and secularism was no less messy, but it was important that it got decided as it did.
2NC
Impact
Capitalism reduces everything to market abstractions—negates value to life and
justifies the extermination of devalued people
Kovel 2 Professor of Social Studies at Bard, 02 (Joel, “The Enemy of Nature,” p140-141)
The precondition of an ecologically rational attitude toward nature is the recognition that nature far
surpasses us and has its own intrinsic value, irreducible to our practice. Thus we achieve differentiation from
nature. It is in this light that we would approach the question of transforming practice ecologically — or, as we now recognize to be the
same thing, dialectically. The
monster that now bestrides the world was born of the conjugation of value
and dominated labour. From the former arose the quantification of reality, and, with this, the loss of
the differentiated recognition essential for ecosystemic integrity; from the latter emerged a kind of
selfhood that could swim in these icy waters. From this standpoint one might call capitalism a ‘regime of the ego’,
meaning that under its auspices a kind of estranged self emerges as the mode of capital’s reproduction. This self is not merely prideful the
ordinary connotation of ‘egotistical’ — more fully, it is the ensemble of those relations that embody the domination of nature from one
side, and, from the other, ensure the reproduction of capital. This ego is the latest version of the purified male principle, emerging aeons
after the initial gendered domination became absorbed and rationalized as profitability and self-maximization (allowing suitable ‘powerwomen’ to join the dance). It is a pure culture of splitting and non-recognition: of itself, of the otherness of nature and of the nature of
others. In terms of the preceding discussion, it is the elevation of the merely individual and isolated mind-as-ego into a reigning principle. ‘~
Capital produces egoic relations, which reproduce capital. The isolated selves of the capitalist order
can choose to become personifications of capital, or may have the role thrust upon them. In either case,
they embark upon a pattern of non-recognition mandated by the fact that the almighty dollar interposes itself between all
elements of experience: all things in the world, all other persons, and between the self and its world: nothing really exists except
in and through monetization. This set-up provides an ideal culture medium for the bacillus of competition and ruthless self-maximization.
Because money is all that ‘counts’, a peculiar heartlessness characterizes capitalists, a tough-minded and
cold abstraction that will sacrifice species, whole continents (viz. Africa) or inconvenient sub-sets of
the population (viz. black urban males) who add too little to the great march of surplus value or may be seen as standing in its way.
The presence of value screens out genuine fellow-feeling or compassion, replacing it with the
calculus of profit-expansion. Never has a holocaust been carried out so impersonally. When the Nazis
killed their victims, the crimes were accompanied
Mestiza conciousness link
Mestiza Consciousness’s tolerance for ambiguity forever separates it from dialectical
materialism because it refuses negativity. Rather, it represents a conscious
submission to cultural schizophrenia that plays into the hand of capital.
Gonzalez 4 [Marcial, “Historical Materialism and Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” Science & Society 68.2]
Consider, for example, Gloria Anzaldua's ground-breaking lit- erary-critical work, Borderlands/la frontera: The New Meztiza. With
good
reason, Borderlands has been considered both literature and cultural criticism. Indeed, the book
reinforces the very concept of the "bor- derlands" through its own internal structure, consciously and
boldly crossing the disciplinary division between literature and criticism. Here, I shall focus on the
critical quality of Borderlands without los- ing sight of its literary features. Anzaldúa refers to cultural
schizo- phrenia through her concept of "mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between
ways" (Anzaldúa, 1987, 78) . She argues that for mestizas "ambivalence from the clash of voices results in
mental and emotional states of perplexity" and "internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness." She adds that
the mestiza's "dual or multiple per- sonality is plagued by psychic restlessness." In describing this "restlessness," Anzaldúa writes, "me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan simultaneamente'' ["My
head spins from contradictoriness. I am disoriented from all the voices that speak to me simultaneously" (my translation).] Anzaldúa
brilliantly exposes the deeply conflicted character of the mestiza psyche, but does not make clear how
"mental nepantilism" will help change the conditions that cause ideological ambivalence. She finds
that mestizas - and, by implication, alienated subjects across racial and gender lines - can potentially
escape alienation by embracing and remain- ing within an ideologically ambivalent consciousness,
stating that "the new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for
ambiguity. . . . She has a plural personality, she oper- ates in a pluralistic mode - nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly,
nothing rejected, nothing abandoned" (79). The lan- guage Anzaldúa uses to describe the mestiza's consciousness
resembles the language of inclusion and pluralism, but it also reflects the influ- ence of cultural
schizophrenia. This holds true despite the fact that Anzaldúa at times seems to be describing a dialectical process through which the
sharpening of contradiction leads to a new qualitative con- dition. Speaking of how the mestiza comes to develop a "new con- sciousness,"
Anzaldúa explains that the mestiza can be jarred out of ambivalence by an intense, and often painful,
emotional event which inverts or resolves the ambivalence. I'm not sure exactly how. The work takes place
underground - subconsciously. . . . That focal point or fulcrum, that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is
where the possibility of uniting all that is separate oc- curs. This assembly is not one where severed or separate pieces merely come together.
Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the
sum of its severed parts. (Anzaldúa, 1987, 77-80.) In this passage, Anzaldúa
describes how subjects achieve a peaceful
state of mind by coping with ideological conflicts. The passage sounds dialectical, but as R. Saldivar
points out, "a true dialectic necessar- ily involves us in negation. In a relationship between opposed
terms, one annuls the other and lifts it up into a higher sphere of existence: development through
opposition and conflict" (R. Saldivar, 8). Anzaldua's "mental nepantilism" has inspired critics and writers
seek- ing to comprehend and explain alienation and ideological ambiva- lence, but the concept falls
short of a "true dialectic": the conflicting aspects of consciousness have been neutralized and
consolidated into a harmonious coexistence; there is no negation here, no elevation to a higher
sphere of existence. Interestingly, critics who quote this passage tend to emphasize the mestiza's
"tolerance for contradic- tions," her "tolerance for ambiguity," and her "pluralistic personal- ity" (G.
Sanchez, 1993, 9; Rosaldo
A2: Perm – Do Both (K Aff)
You cannot permute a method – it strips out all of the conceptual theory that allows
us both understand the world and to create a praxis to end oppression
Tumino 1 [Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, ““What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More
than Ever”, Red Critique, p. online]
Orthodox Marxism has become a test-case of the "radical" today. Yet, what passes for orthodoxy on
the left—whether like Smith and Zizek they claim to support it, or, like Butler and Rorty they want to "achieve our country" by excluding it
from "U.S. Intellectual life" ("On Left Conservatism"), is a parody of orthodoxy which hybridizes its central concepts and
renders them into flexodox simulations. Yet, even in its very textuality, however, the orthodox is a resistance to the flexodox.
Contrary to the common-sensical view of "orthodox" as "traditional" or "conformist" "opinions," is its other meaning: ortho-doxy not as
flexodox "hybridity," but as "original" "ideas." "Original," not in the sense of epistemic "event," "authorial" originality and so forth, but, as in
chemistry, in its opposition to "para," "meta," "post" and other ludic hybridities: thus "ortho" as resistance to the annotations that mystify the
original ideas of Marxism and hybridize it for the "special interests" of various groups. The "original" ideas of Marxism are inseparable from
their effect as "demystification" of ideology—for example the deployment of "class" that allows a demystification of daily life from the haze of
consumption. Class
is thus an "original idea" of Marxism in the sense that it cuts through the hype of
cultural agency under capitalism and reveals how culture and consumption are tied to labor, the
everyday determined by the workday: how the amount of time workers spend engaging in surplus-labor determines the amount
of time they get for reproducing and cultivating their needs. Without changing this division of labor social change is
impossible. Orthodoxy is a rejection of the ideological annotations: hence, on the one hand, the resistance to orthodoxy as "rigid" and
"dogmatic" "determinism," and, on the other, its hybridization by the flexodox as the result of which it has become
almost impossible today to read the original ideas of Marxism, such as "exploitation"; "surplus-value";
"class"; "class antagonism"; "class struggle"; "revolution"; "science" (i.e., objective knowledge); "ideology" (as
"false consciousness"). Yet, it is these ideas alone that clarify the elemental truths through which theory
ceases to be a gray activism of tropes, desire and affect, and becomes, instead, a red, revolutionary guide to
praxis for a new society freed from exploitation and injustice. Marx's original scientific discovery was his labor theory
of value. Marx's labor theory of value is an elemental truth of Orthodox Marxism that is rejected by the
flexodox left as the central dogmatism of a "totalitarian" Marxism. It is only Marx's labor theory of
value, however, that exposes the mystification of the wages system that disguises exploitation as a
"fair exchange" between capital and labor and reveals the truth about this relation as one of exploitation.
Only Orthodox Marxism explains how what the workers sell to the capitalist is not labor, a commodity like
any other whose price is determined by fluctuations in supply and demand, but their labor-power—their ability to labor in a system
which has systematically "freed" them from the means of production so they are forced to work or starve—whose value is determined by the
amount of time socially necessary to reproduce it daily. The value of labor-power is equivalent to the value of wages workers consume daily in
the form of commodities that keep them alive to be exploited tomorrow. Given the technical composition of production today this amount of
time is a slight fraction of the workday the majority of which workers spend producing surplus-value over and above their needs. The surplusvalue is what is pocketed by the capitalists in the form of profit when the commodities are sold. Class is the antagonistic division thus
established between the exploited and their exploiters. Without
Marx's labor theory of value one could only contest
the after effects of this outright theft of social labor-power rather than its cause lying in the private ownership
of production. The flexodox rejection of the labor theory of value as the "dogmatic" core of a totalitarian
Marxism therefore is a not so subtle rejection of the principled defense of the (scientific) knowledge
workers need for their emancipation from exploitation because only the labor theory of value exposes the
opportunism of knowledges (ideology) that occult this exploitation. Without the labor theory of value
socialism would only be a moral dogma that appeals to the sentiments of "fairness" and "equality" for a
"just" distribution of the social wealth that does the work of capital by naturalizing the exploitation of
labor under capitalism giving it an acceptable "human face."
The permutation is severance – it severs out of the methodology of capitalism rooted
in the 1AC. This a voting issue because it creates a moving target that steals neg
ground a makes it impossible to debate.
Ethics DA – We have ethical obligation to repudiate capitalism – this means any risk a
link is a reason to reject the permutation
Marsh 95 (James, Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, “Critique, Action, Liberation” p. 334335)
An example from the sphere of personal morality should make the difference clear. When a friend, relative, teacher, or minister counsels an
alcoholic to confront her habit, she is not making a prediction. Indeed it may seem unlikely, given this particular person’s past history, that she
will lick her habit. Nonetheless, the moral obligation to get over her habit remains. Similarly,
an obligation exists to get over our
capitalism as a social equivalent of drunkenness. If the argument of this chapter is correct, we cannot renounce
such an attempt at transcendence without giving up on the ethical project or curtailing that project by
confining it to the sphere of intimate, interpersonal relations. I am a good father or husband or lover in my private life,
but i remain exploitative, cruel, and inhumane in my public, capitalistic life. Such ethical renunciation or curtailment is the
death or mutilation of the human; denial of utopia is a living death. Ideologies of scientific elitism,
therefore, as they function in capitalist society are correct if there is no such thing as ethical,
constitutive reason operating in community. If such constitutive reason is possible and actual in human beings as human in
community, then scientific elitism is false. Men and women acting democratically and participatively do have a capacity to understand
themselves and their lives in a way that is cogent and in touch with reality. Indeed, many of the popular movements in Europe, England, and
the United States in the last twenty years such as feminism, environmentalism, civil rights, and antiwar movements, often acting against the
advice or opinion of experts have shown themselves to be right and effective. In the Vietnam War, for example, millions of people in the united
states taking to the streets in protest proved the “best and the brightest” in the white house, pentagon, and state department wrong. The “best
and the brightest” according to the standards of scientific elitism proved to be deluded. The presence of an ethical, political rationality in all of
us as human invalidates scientific elitism at its core. As I am arguing it here, a fundamental link exists among dialectical phenomenology, ethical,
constitutive rationality, and democracy. Philosophy and ethics, properly understood, are antielitist. To
think in a utopian manner,
then, about community and socialism is to free ourselves from the excessive hold that science and
technology exert over our minds and imaginations. We begin to see that science and technology and
expertise, even though they are legitimate within their proper domains, do not exhaust or monopolize
the definition of reason and other forms of reason and knowledge that are more informative,
profound, and fundamental, indeed, compared to certain expressions of art or ethics or philosophy or
religion, science and technology are relatively superficial. What revelatory power does a scientific equation have
compared to Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech? What does an empirical of human populations show me about human life compared to the
insight of Marx’s capital? What can a factual study of war show about its horrors compared to Picasso’s Guernica? To the extend, therefore,
that science and technology dominate in the twentieth century as not only the highest forms of reason by the only forms of reason, they shove
other, more profound, more reflective, more fundamental forms of reason to the side and twentieth-century industrial society emerges as an
inverted, topsy-turvy, absurd world. What seems normal, factural, rational, and sane in such a world is in fact abnormal, apparent, irrational,
and absurd. We begin to suspect and see that science and technology appear as the highest and only forms of reason because capitalism has
appropriated science and technology for its own ends as productive force and ideology. In
science and technology capitalism
has found the forms of rationality most appropriate for itself, perfectly manifesting it, mirroring it,
and justifying it. In such an absurd, inverted topsy-turvy world, fidelity to the life of reason demands
critique, resistance, and revolutionary transcendence. One has to pierce the veil of such a world, see
through it as absurd rather than accepting it as normal and sane. The prevailing rationality is
profoundly irrational.
DeFazio
The aff gets coopted: the elimination of physical barriers only upholds capitalism by
increasing competition for labor while failing to eliminate social and economic division
which is the true limit to social mobility
DeFazio, professor @ the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse,
02
[Kimberly, May/June, Red Critique, “Whither Borders?”,
http://www.redcritique.org/MayJune02/whitherborders.htm]
If it were really the "universal" interests of the "host nation" that immigration policies work to serve,
and not big business, all members of the nation would see their living and working conditions
improve. Instead, in all nations, the conditions of the majority of working people have drastically
deteriorated, while corporate profits have skyrocketed. If immigration (and the permeability of borders) were
really used to benefit all members of the national population "immigration" would be used to ensure
all people had adequate resources to meet all their needs, rather than pit workers against one
another to compete for disappearing jobs with dwindling wages and dwindling basic resources such as
water and medicine. In spite of capitalist ideologues' best efforts at constructing imaginary borders, it is, increasingly, the class position of
workers everywhere—their lack of access to the means of production and, as a result, the increasing lack of access to all other social resources
necessary to survive—that is becoming clear: not their "national" insecurity but their material insecurity. The
ruling classes, in short,
are proving daily their utter incapacity to actually secure the material conditions of citizens, even
while they attempt to divert all attention onto matters of national insecurity.
Conciousness raising
Privileging discourse and ideas guarantees mystifying the material conditions that
cause class oppression – only a return to material criticism can confront the material
oppression of global capitalism
Zavarzadeh 3 (Mas’ud, “The Pedagogy of Totality” p.3-4, in “JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and
Politics”, Volume 23.1, http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/vol23.1.html)
Berube's lesson obscures this CIA which is an extension of U.S. corporations and whose task is to wage a clandestine class war against the
working people of the world to keep the world safe for U.s. investment. There is no hint in his teaching of the event that the CIA's actions might
be symptoms of the systematic aggression of market forces against the workers and that the event might be an outcome ofmarket forces. In his
teaching, the CIA becomes a story machine producing absorbing stories that circle around personalities, places, and actions but lead nowhere.
They build an illusion of knowing. Analysis ofthe economic role ofthe CIA (which produces material knowledge of global relations) is obstructed by details that have no analytical effect. Why, for instance, did the CIA fight to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan? Berube's "waging
the cold war" seems to imply that the dynamic of the conflict is "ideology." The U.S. and the Soviets simply had two different "political" systems
and cultures. Thus, in Berube's version ofhistory, it is natural that the CIA wanted to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and increase the U.S.'s
sphere of political and cultural power in the region. The conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States is, in other words, a clash of
ideas. Underlining
his pedagogy is, in other words, a view of history as an expansionism of "power" (see Hardt
and Negri) and as conflicts of "ideologies" (see Fukuyama). It is based on the notion that "discourse" and
"ideas" shape the world since, ultimately, history itself is the discursive journey ofthe Soul toward a cultural and spiritual resolution of
material contradictions. This theory mystifies history by displacing "class" (labor) with "ideas" and
"discourse," and it consequently produces world history as a "clash of civilizations" that rewrites the
world in the interest of the Euroamerican capitalism (see Huntington). According to the clash theory (which is
the most popular interpretive axis o f 9/ 11), people do what they do because of their "culture" not because they
exploit the labor of others (and live in comfort), or because their labor is exploited by others (and therefore they live in abj ect
poverty). The event, in other words, is an instance of the clash of civilizations: culture ("values," "language," "religion," the "affective") did it.
"They" hate "our" way of life ("Their
'values' clash with our 'values"'). Since "values" are transhistorical, the
clash is spiritual, not material. But culture, didn't do it. Contrary to contemporary dogma (seeHall,"Central- ity"),
culture is not autonomous; it is the bearer of economic interests . Cultural values are, to be clear,
inversive: they are a spiritualization of material interests. Culture cannot solve the contradictions that
develop at the point of production; it merely suspends them. Material contradictions can be solved
only materially - namely, by the class struggles that would end the global regime of wage labor. The event is an unfolding of
a material contradiction not a clash of civilizations. If teaching the event does not at least raise the possibility of a class understanding of it, the
teaching is not pedagogy; it is ideology (as I outline it later in this essay).
1NR
Historical materialism must come first - it predetermines consciousness and the very
possibilities of reflective thinking
Marx 1859 (Karl, a pretty important dude. “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
Preface” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm) JM
>edited for gendered language<
In the social production of their existence, [people] inevitably enter into definite relations, which are
independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of
their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society,
the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The
mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual
life. It is not the consciousness of [people] that determines their existence, but their social existence
that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of
society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal
terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive
forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then
begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation
In studying such transformations it is
always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in
short, ideological forms in which [people] become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does
not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its
consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of
material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is
ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and
new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their
existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
Their own evidence proves that immigration problematization is understood through
a lens of capitalism. They have it backwards.
Ackerman & Furman 13 (Alissa, Ph.D., Criminology & Deviance, The City University of
New York (CUNY), Rich, Ph.D., Social Welfare, Yeshiva University. “The criminalization
of immigration and the privatization of the immigration detention: implications for
justice”, Contemporary Justice Review, 16(2), 2013)IAA
The construction of immigration as a public problem¶ Throughout the history of the USA, immigration
has been variably
problematized, depending upon the social and economic context of the time. The problematization of
immigration has hardly been a random act by random social forces, but instead is shaped by nativist forces and actors who
construct the immigrant as the cause of social ills within the American context (Jacobson, 2008).
Understanding how public problems are formed is essential to understanding the problematization of
immigra- tion and the i mmigration detention phenomenon . Gusfield (1981) presents a valu- able means of
understanding the various factors that influence public policy formation.¶ In his seminal work on the nature of public problems, Gusfield notes
several key issues in exploring how problems are conceptualized. First, he notes that it is essential to understand what institutions and/or
organizations benefit from the¶ ¶ conceptualization. He also notes the key place of the notion of responsibility in the definition and resolution
of the ‘problem.’ That is, responsibility has two meanings: the first being who is responsible for causing the problem, the second is identifying
who is responsible for solving the problem.
In the case of immigration, the way in which each of these notions of
responsibility are constructed and ‘owned’ shape the way immigration as a ‘problem’ has lead to its
criminalization. State policy makers and the prison industrial complex have each become powerful
forces in the shaping of the nature of the construction of the ‘problem’ and how it is resolved.
Addition- ally, the phenomenon of privatization creates a powerful opportunity for the social
construction of the undocumented immigrant into a powerful potential source of revenue for forprofit corporations.
Second ev also proves our point – proves it’s needed for revenue. They have no
reverse casual evidence.
Ackerman & Furman 13 (Alissa, Ph.D., Criminology & Deviance, The City University of
New York (CUNY), Rich, Ph.D., Social Welfare, Yeshiva University. “The criminalization
of immigration and the privatization of the immigration detention: implications for
justice”, Contemporary Justice Review, 16(2), 2013)IAA
In a recent NPR investigation, Sullivan (2010b) found
that CCA executives believed that immigration detention
would bring an increase in revenues from ICE. Other private prison companies have stated this as a
business plan as well. ALEC, members of state legislatures, and individuals from these private prison
companies met and drafted model legislation related to immigrant detention (Sullivan, 2010a). Soon after the
drafting of this legislation, Arizona’s SB 1070 was introduced. According to Sullivan, ALEC and CCA played a crucial role in the drafting of the bill.
Thirty-six Arizona state legislators co-sponsored the bill and of those, 30 received some form of donation or contribution from a private prison
company and 24 were members of ALEC (Sullivan, 2010a). The legislation drafted at the ALEC meeting, became SB 1070 almost verbatim.¶ Not
only did members of the state legislature have connections to private prison corporations, so too did Jan
Brewer, Arizona’s governor. It has been reported that two of Brewer’s top advisers were former lobbyists for private prison companies. Sullivan
(2010b) conducted
a review of the states that have adopted or are consider- ing adopted Arizona-like
immigration law. From this review, it is apparent that many state lawmakers who have crafted immigration bills are members of ALEC,
with five legislators from these states being in the room when the original bill was drafted. As recently as two years ago, Sullivan (2010a)
reported that during a con- ference call to investors, when asked about immigration legislation, the CEO of The GEO Group stated, ‘…
those
people coming across the border and getting caught are going to have to be detained and that for
me, at least I think, there's going to be enhanced opportunities for what we do’. As states attempt to
decrease their prison populations, private prison companies must seek revenue elsewhere. The CEO
of the GEO Group candidly implied, immigrant detention is as good a venture as any.¶
The inevitable crisis of capital will spur totalitarianism – only the emergence of the
alternative can head this off
Mezaros 95 (Istavan, Prof Emeritus at University of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of
Transition, p. 140)
In view of the fact that the most intractable of the global capital system’s contradictions is the one between the internal unrestrainability
of its economic constituents and the now inescapable necessity of introducing major restraints, any hope for finding a way out of this
vicious circle under the circumstances marked by the activation of capital’s absolute limits must be vested in the political dimension of the
system. Thus, in the light of recent legislative measures which already point in this direction, there
can be no doubt that the
full power of the state will be activated to serve the end of squaring capital’s vicious circle, even if
it means subjecting all potential dissent to extreme authoritarian constraints. Equally there can be
no doubt that whether or not such a remedial action (in conformity to the global capital system’s
structural limits) will be successfully pursued, despite its obvious authoritarian character and
destructiveness, will depend on the working class’s ability or failure to radically rearticulate the
socialist movement as a truly international enterprise. In any event, what makes matters
particularly serious is the fact that the far-reaching issues themselves which confront humankind
at the present stage of historical development cannot be avoided either by the ruling capital
system or by any alternative to it. Although, as a matter of historical contingency, they have arisen
from the activation of capital’s absolute limits, they cannot be conveniently bypassed, nor their
gravity wished out of existence. On the contrary, they remain the overriding requirement of all-embracing remedial action in
the reproductive practices of humankind for as long as the vicious circle of capital’s present-day historical contingency is not irretrievably
consigned to the past. Indeed, paradoxically, the ability to meet in a sustainable way the absolute historical challenge that had arisen from
the perverse historical contingencies and contradictions of the capital system constitutes the measure of viability of any social metabolic
alternative to the ruling order. Consequently, the
struggle to overcome the threatening absolute limits of the
capital system is bound to determine the historical agenda for the foreseeable future.
Historical materialism is the best methodology for understanding and fighting capitalit recognizes that capitalism is not inevitable, overcomes the depoliticized nature of
economics, and opens space for solidarity and human agency
Holmstrom 97 (Nancy, Professor Emeritus Department of Philosophy at Rutgers, Renewing Historical
Materialism, Solidarity, http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2198)
Wood's interpretation of historical materialism has been pejoratively labeled "Political Marxism," but she is happy to appropriate the label. For
she argues that Marx revealed what had been concealed by economists, that the essence of capitalist production is political in that it rests on
the relations of power between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Political
Marxism presents
relations of production "in their political aspect, that aspect in which they are actually contested, as
relations of domination . . . as the power to organize and govern production and appropriation . . . the
object of this theoretical stance is practical, to illuminate the terrain of struggle by viewing modes of
production not as abstract structures but as they actually confront people who must act in relation to them." (25) Thus Wood's stress (and
Marx's) on politics and class struggle in historical explanation is not counterposed to a stress on the mode of production or the economic, but
rather intends to reveal how deeply social and political these are. Wood aims to restore this insight to the center of historical and social
analyses where it belongs. Most historians and social scientists have missed this point. Wood suggests that one
important source of
the prevalent defeatist sense that nothing other than capitalism is possible, is the idea that capitalism
has always existed, which she shows to be implicit in many theories of history. Weber, for example, uses "the Protestant ethic" to
explain the origins of capitalism, but unless a society is already a generalized market society and workers are already subordinated to capital,
this ethic will not lead to the productivity and profit maximization characteristic of capitalism. So Weber's explanation begs the question of how
capitalism comes into existence. Some Marxist theories of history make the same mistake. For example, John Roemer assumes that capitalism
already existed "as an option" within feudalism, thereby, like Weber, begging the question of how capitalism came into being. In
contrast
to such theories, Wood cites approvingly Robert Brenner's work as stressing the specificity of each mode of
production and looking to explain the transition to capitalism in terms of the dynamics, contradictions
and struggles within pre-capitalist relations of production. Brenner's work helps to fill in the details of
what Wood -- following Marx -- stresses is the crucial condition necessary for capitalism: the divorce
of the actual producers from their conditions of reproduction, an historical transformation that is
simultaneously economic, social and political. Another source of error in interpreting historical materialism lies in hanging
too heavy a theoretical load on the metaphor of "base and superstructure," which Wood says was always more trouble than it was worth
because it suggests separate self-enclosed spheres. This was worsened by Stalinist mechanical, usually technological, determinism. The
standard alternative to mechanical determinist interpretations, however, was a vague humanism. E.P. Thompson's work is often portrayed as
an example of the latter, but Wood sees him as her kind of Political Marxist. Wood argues that Thompson's work transcends these false
dualisms, demonstrating that the
economic is irreducibly social and political, consisting of human relations of
exploitation and appropriation.
[Thompson is most famous for The Making of the English Working Class, whose profound impact on a radical generation is recalled in tributes
by Michael Lowy and Barbara Winslow, ATC 48, January-February 1994 -- ed.] Against Thompson's critics, such as Althusser, G.A. Cohen and
Perry Anderson, Wood shows how his work
consistently addresses the Marxist problem of how to give credence
to both the logic of modes of production, and to human agency within the conditions set by those
logics. The critics, she charges, are essentially ahistorical: They see no alternative to structural necessity
except contingency, whereas Thompson sees "historical determinations, structured processes with
human agencies." (78)